Matt Levine: observation

Transcript context

…Some activities are what we might call nerdy and others are not. Country and western music is not very nerdy. There are plenty of bars, say, in Lower Manhattan that are not very nerdy. Finance has become pretty nerdy. What makes an activity nerdy? [laughter] Has finance become pretty nerdy? What makes an activity nerdy, there are two clusters of factors. One is having some sort of academic barrier, where you have to be smart to do it, or you have to learn something to do it. The other, traditionally, is unpopularity, right? You’re a nerd because you’re not cool. What’s happened with finance . . . finance in the last 10 years has become nerdier in the academic sense. The threshold to be hired on a trading floor in the days of Liar’s Poker was you needed to be a fun guy to hang out with, and maybe you’ve gone to high school. Now it’s like you need a PhD in physics. So in that sense it’s become nerdier. Computer programming when I was a kid was quite nerdy because it was academic, but also people were like, “Why are you doing that? Go play sports. ” Whereas now you see enough Mark Zuckerberg stories, and it’s like computer programming is the way to become a billionaire who has not just power, but controls the world’s social relationships. Finance is at that weird point where in New York, if you go out to the club, there are a lot of finance people there. It doesn’t have quite that, the pure nerdiness component. Has finance become less unpopular because of passage of time since the crisis? Or is it, in part, because tech is now so unpopular with the media and some intellectuals that it’s taken over that pride of place? Finance is pushed to the side, and we can be ignored a bit, maybe like highly skilled carpenters but nerdier?…

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